Pathfinder has provided super detailed materials on the gods of Golarion and their followers. If you’re looking to visit Golarion in a D&D 5th edition game or just looking for ideas to create your own pantheon, hopefully this will help get you started.

Where to Find Golarion’s Deities

Pathfinder has provided heaps of background for the deities of their Golarion campaign setting. These books or the website links below are a great place to start.

Inner Sea GodsThis book has information for “nearly 300 deities from across the Inner Sea region and beyond.” It also provides “everything you need to know about the gods and their followers, temples, adventurers, holy days, otherworldly realms, divine minions, and more” for the most powerful deities of the setting.

Gods amd MagicThis 64 page book provides details for the core twenty deities of the setting and details on over 40 additional deities.

Core Rulebook
This book outlines the core 20 deities in the Classes > Cleric section. It’s also a must have for anyone who wants to play Pathfinder. If you’re one of the many with this book on your shelf, crack it open and check out page 43.

The First Gods of Golarion

Like many fantasy pantheons, the dawn of mortal life begins with the gods at war. The first gods battled one of their own, Rovagug, to stop him from destroying all of creation. Many minor gods died in these battles, but Rovagug was eventually imprisoned. The gods who survived, returned to their homes in the Great Beyond to hide, nurse their wounds, start families or even split themselves into multiple beings. Overall, the gods adopted a policy of non-intervention, leaving the mortal world to the mortals, with the exception of granting spells to followers. Over time mortals even ascended to become gods and challenge the first gods.

A Pantheon for a Golarion Campaign

Golarion plays host to a large pantheon of deities, ranging from the all-powerful greater deities to the minor gods and demigods, who are mostly powerful extraplanar creatures.

The list below is for only the 20 most common deities of Golarion, generally associated with the Inner Sea region. There’s more pantheons to support the Dragon Empires, Osirian and other regions or racial specific pantheons.

Pathfinder has way more domains than D&D 5th edition, so assigning domains to each god is far from an exact science. I do like the D&D simple approach of having fewer domains, but it might have been good to have one or two more. For each god I looked at their portfolio more than their assigned domains when I was suggesting domains for D&D 5th edition.

Pathfinder provides its rules under the Open Game License, but the gods themselves (and the Golarion Campaign Setting) are not under that license, so my listing here only maps domains and doesn’t provide a ton of additional details about the gods (such as centers of worship, sacred colors and animals, symbol, favored weapon). To really understand the pantheon you’ll need to consult a Pathfinder book like the Gods and Magic or one of the wiki community sites.

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Shawn is an author and co-founder of Tribality.com. He first got into tabletop RPGs through ninjas and then by playing a Kender in Dragonlance. Years later, he can be found running games in the Nentir Vale and his own Seas of Vodari campaign setting.